Restructuring of marketing into single agency recommended

The Dunedin City Council is to consult ratepayers on
restructuring the city's tourism marketing, city marketing and
i-Site functions into a single city marketing agency, nominally
called Destination Dunedin.

The reshaped Tourism Dunedin would not initially include
events marketing or business development.

City councillors at yesterday's pre-draft annual plan hearing
considered the proposed restructure, as outlined in a report
from the council's general manager of city strategy and
development, Dr Sue Bidrose.

She said the recently adopted economic development strategy
for Dunedin stated that in broad terms of branding and
marketing, the city needed to evolve from primarily selling
the city to visitors and students, to attracting public and
private investors, skilled people and entrepreneurs.

Transferring marketing activities to a single marketing
agency that co-ordinated tourism, events, investment, skills
and migrant promotion and attraction efforts was one of eight
initial projects in the strategy.

With regards to events marketing, there was a need to improve
co-ordination of bidding and marketing of key events and an
obvious overlap with the management of the key council venues
that hosted events, those things could be resolved without
changing the existing structure.

Considerable work was under way examining event attraction
and marketing with Dunedin Venues Management Ltd (DVML), and
with the Town Hall yet to be completed and Dunedin Venues Ltd
(DVL) still relatively young, the suggestion was that the
current structure be left to allow time to measure the
results.

The council's economic overview, business support and
industry development roles could also potentially be part of
the new entity, but remained within the city council in the
meantime while its role was still critical in the delivery of
the eight key projects of the strategy.

The integration of city marketing to the new agency would not
include the marketing of council-owned facilities such as
museums, libraries, the art gallery and botanic gardens etc,
nor the running of council-run events, council meetings,
civic functions etc, which would remain in-house, she said.

Asked by Cr Lee Vandervis why the council's whole marketing
team was not being rolled into the new agency, Dr Bidrose
said that was considered, but those staff were solely focused
on the council's own facilities and events and to move them
out of their home agency made no sense.

Councillors generally agreed with the proposal, although said
they would like to see stronger links between the
council-owned company and the council, including more
frequent reporting.

One of the weaknesses of Dunedin in recent years, deputy
mayor Chris Staynes said, was that it had failed to gain
traction outside Dunedin, about what Dunedin was about as a
city.

''We need to strengthen that. The impact of getting marketing
right is significant.''

He cited Wellington as a city that was marketing itself right
and said Dunedin needed to get a campaign going that worked
as well as that, if not better.

''We need to get [Dunedin] known for what it is best at.''

The council supported the proposal and agreed it should be
consulted on in the draft annual plan.

The agreed that if the marketing restructure went ahead, it
would be reviewed in 2015.

The final name of the new agency is yet to be determined.

Following consultation, staff will report back to the council
on May 13 with a recommendation on whether and how the
restructure should proceed and the details of any
implementation plan.